An interview with Steve Gibson and his recent experiences with a distributed denial of service attack. " As the Internet has become easier to use, it's also become easier to hack. It used to require serious computer expertise to shut down a Web site or launch a virus. Now it's easy. All a hacker needs is the right tools to cause online mayhem.. . .
An interview with Steve Gibson and his recent experiences with a distributed denial of service attack. " As the Internet has become easier to use, it's also become easier to hack. It used to require serious computer expertise to shut down a Web site or launch a virus. Now it's easy. All a hacker needs is the right tools to cause online mayhem. NPR's Larry Abramson has the story of one man who tried to fight back when his Web site came under attack.

LARRY ABRAMSON reporting: Early last month, Steve Gibson was minding his own business, monitoring traffic at grc.com, his Internet business site.

Mr. STEVEN GIBSON (Grc.com): Suddenly without any provocation or reason that I knew of at the time, the lines that traced the activity just dropped straight down like falling off a cliff and just went flat. Essentially we were off the Net. We were just gone.

ABRAMSON: Gibson is a software developer and he assumed that this was a technical glitch, but the record showed it was much more mysterious and nefarious. Grc.com was the victim of an all-out assault.

Mr. GIBSON: We looked at the logs. I analyzed the logs further, and I discovered that exactly 474 computers were simultaneously attacking our site, grc.com, for the express purpose of driving us off the Internet.

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